SAMARA, Russia, November 2 (R-Sport) - Fatal flooding indirectly led to a planned World Cup 2018 stadium in the Russian city of Samara being relocated to a new site, regional governor Nikolai Merkushkin said Friday.
In response to floods that killed 172 people in and around the town of Krymsk in July, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree specifying any new large building near water must be at least eight meters above the water level.
With Samara’s 45,000-seater stadium originally set to be built on an island where two rivers meet, these new rules would have made the project far too expensive, Merkushkin said.
“It would take another ten billion rubles ($32 million) of additional investment,” he said, suggesting that the money could be better spent on flood protection for rest of the region.
"For that money, we would be able to landscape not only Samara and Tolyatti, but could landscape practically the entire region."
The new site is near a major highway and the airport in the central Russian city. A tender issued by the local government Friday stated that the price of the stadium has increased to around $430 million.
That is $100 million more than regional deputy governor Alexander Nefedov said last month, and more than double the figure of $180 million widely mentioned in Russian media in late 2010, after Russia was awarded the tournament.
FIFA declined to say whether the switch to the new site would affect Samara's status as a host city, when asked about the issue by R-Sport.
"Following the host cities' appointment for the 2018 FIFA World Cup at the end of September 2012, the stadium experts of FIFA and the Local Organising Committee are now in process to assess the proposals submitted by the host cities to re-confirm the final stadiums to host the event," the FIFA media office said in a statement e-mailed to R-Sport.
The original site for the Samara stadium, on the river, had been variously criticised for being far from city transport links and hotel accommodation, ruining a river view and requiring port traffic to be rerouted.
A tender to design the arena there was canceled by Merkushin in July, after the visit, when he said the cost estimates were not transparent.
